Quotes by Amitava Kumar - Page 2

A postcolonial writer who has often been credited with mixing the mundane with the magical, and history with fiction, is Salman Rushdie.
Amitava Kumar / Writer
Mixing
Mundane
Credited
Magical
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If India breaks your heart with untold inequalities, it also surprises you with the unheralded achievements of its most humble citizens.
Amitava Kumar / Writer
Citizens
Humble
India
Achievements
Breaks
Surprises
Inequalities
Untold
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'An Obedient Father' is perhaps the novel that, some might say, Arundhati Roy had wanted to write when she wrote 'The God of Small Things.'
Amitava Kumar / Writer
Obedient
Small Things
Roy
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Everything in American public life, when it comes to race relations, serves as a frame for a history of violence and degrading humiliation.
Amitava Kumar / Writer
Degrading
Humiliation
Public Life
Race Relations
American Public
Frame
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In 'Bombay-London-New York,' I speak of the ways in which the 'soft' emotion of nostalgia is turned into the 'hard' emotion of fundamentalism.
Amitava Kumar / Writer
Fundamentalism
Nostalgia
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An essay is not an op-ed that tells its reader what to think. An essay is a complicated working-out of one's own contradictions and complicities.
Amitava Kumar / Writer
Contradictions
Essay
Op-Ed
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With non-fiction, there is the struggle to be accurate. With fiction, it is a bit different: the desire to let imagination take you to new places.
Amitava Kumar / Writer
Accurate
New Places
Non Fiction
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I have long held that many of the writers and artists working in the aftermath of 9/11 have presented a faux familiarity with the so-called terrorist mind.
Amitava Kumar / Writer
Aftermath
Familiarity
Faux
Terrorist
Held
Presented
So-Called
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Governance in India comes in the iron-clad armour of bureaucracy. Anyone in uniform considers it his or her right that we regard them as some sort of deity.
Amitava Kumar / Writer
Armour
Bureaucracy
Governance
Regard
Considers
Deity
Uniform
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A writer can be subjective, even digressive, or introspective and certainly judgmental. This is a simplification, of course, but as a general rule, it holds true.
Amitava Kumar / Writer
Introspective
Judgmental
Simplification
Subjective
General Rule
Holds
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My own personal conviction is that if I were writing without thinking about how images or how journalism is creating a world for us, I would not be happy about it.
Amitava Kumar / Writer
Conviction
Be Happy
Images
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Indian writers in English are rank individualists. Even among the progressives, there is a strain of anti-leftism, or at least a suspicion of any organized politics.
Amitava Kumar / Writer
Organized
Strain
Suspicion
Individualist
Progressives
Rank
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In academe, we ought to temper our criticism of the idea of self-help because, in a more complex way, it is precisely what we offer our students through our teaching.
Amitava Kumar / Writer
Criticism
Self Help
Precisely
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For me to say that all novels in English written by Indians are all alike would be a bit like saying that all the cows in India look the same and have identical horns.
Amitava Kumar / Writer
Cows
Horns
Identical
Alike
Indians
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There is a great deal of freshness and charm in '400 Blows.' There is also a great deal of visual poetry in the way in which Truffaut's camera looks at his beloved city.
Amitava Kumar / Writer
Beloved
Charm
Freshness
Visual
Blows
Great Deal
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I should not romanticize the simplicity of a village. For instance, the place from where I used to buy a packet of glucose biscuits in my village is now selling cellphones.
Amitava Kumar / Writer
Biscuits
Instance
Selling
Village
Buy
Packet
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Inequality reigns in horrifying ways, and not everyone can even read, but the world of media and advertising withholds very little from the imagination of the dispossessed.
Amitava Kumar / Writer
Advertising
Inequality
Dispossessed
Horrifying
Reigns
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Authenticity does matter, but only as it serves the novel's more traditional literary demands: that the fault lines be drawn where the internal life and the larger world meet.
Amitava Kumar / Writer
Authenticity
Lines
Novel
Traditional
Life Where World
Drawn
Internal
Meet
Serve
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Each employed immigrant has his or her place of work. It is only the taxi driver, forever moving on wheels, who occupies no fixed space. He represents the immigrant condition.
Amitava Kumar / Writer
Moving On
Employed
Fixed
Taxi
Wheels
Condition
Driver
Immigrant
Occupies
Taxi Driver
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We live in a cynical system where the powerful are able to exploit the demand of the aggressive few, from whichever religion or group, to bargain for more power or cynical advantage.
Amitava Kumar / Writer
Aggressive
Cynical
Demand
Bargain
Exploit
More Power
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Mistaken identity, of course, has been the province of much postcolonial fiction. An important feature of this writing is the manner in which misrecognition has haunted all cognition.
Amitava Kumar / Writer
Cognition
Mistaken
Feature
Haunted
Manner
Province
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Such is the impurity of our enterprise, as writers or as critics, that even in the act of proclaiming our freedom from the demands of authenticity, we are never free from brandishing it.
Amitava Kumar / Writer
Critics
Proclaiming
Freedom Free Never
Freedom From
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The radio stations will happily recycle a badly worded statement by a politician all day but will steer clear of broadcasting more than once or twice a poem by Tomas Transtromer or Rita Dove.
Amitava Kumar / Writer
Broadcasting
Clear
Dove
Politician
Radio
Radio Stations
Steer
Twice
All Day
Badly
Recycle
Happily
Poem
Rita
Statement
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Culture survives in smaller spaces - not in the history books that erect monuments to the nation's grand history but in cafes and cinema houses, village squares, and half-forgotten libraries.
Amitava Kumar / Writer
History Books
Squares
Village
Erect
Grand
Houses
Libraries
Monuments
Smaller
Spaces
Survives
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I have a couple of thick files about things that have gone wrong between people; I ought to write about them in the manner of a thriller. It would finally convince me that I was a real writer.
Amitava Kumar / Writer
Convince
Files
Thick
Me People Real
Manner
Thriller
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I arrived in the U.S. for graduate study in literature in the fall of 1986. I was twenty-three. After a year, I began to paint, even though I had come to the U.S. intending to become a writer.
Amitava Kumar / Writer
Paint
Arrived
Graduate
Intending
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When I close my eyes and think of a writer, I don't imagine him or her as someone who is sitting above me on a pedestal, blindfolded, holding the scales of justice in one hand! No, I see sentences.
Amitava Kumar / Writer
Pedestal
Scales
Sentences
Holding
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A wonderful innovation of the Occupy Wall Street movement was the use of the human microphone - the name given to the body of the audience repeating, amplifying, each statement made by the speaker.
Amitava Kumar / Writer
Innovation
Occupy Wall Street
Microphone
Occupy
Speaker
Repeating
Statement
Wall Street
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For some members of the radical Left, particularly in the West, people in developing countries are an ideological abstraction, on whom fantasies of liberation are projected from a comfortable distance.
Amitava Kumar / Writer
Abstraction
Developing
Developing Countries
Distance
Ideological
Liberation
Fantasies
Projected
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I haven't reported in grand detail on rituals of American life, road journeys or malls or the death of steel-manufacturing towns. I think this is because I feel a degree of alienation that I cannot combat.
Amitava Kumar / Writer
Alienation
American Life
Combat
Malls
Towns
Detail
Grand
Journeys
Rituals
Reported
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Hemingway's short story 'Hills Like White Elephants' is a classic of its kind. It illustrates Hemingway's 'iceberg theory,' which requires that a story find its effectiveness by hiding more than it reveals.
Amitava Kumar / Writer
Classic
Effectiveness
Elephants
Hiding
Iceberg
Short Story
Hemingway
Illustrate
Reveals
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You ask a politician a question, like, why they ran in an election, and you'll hear, I assume, something about wanting to contribute to the community or bring about social justice. I had no such high goals.
Amitava Kumar / Writer
Election
High Goals
Ran
Social Justice
Assume
Contribute
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I grew up in India during the 1960s and '70s in a meat-eating Hindu family. Only my mother and my grandparents were vegetarians. The rest of us enjoyed eating - on special occasions - chicken or fish or mutton.
Amitava Kumar / Writer
Mutton
Hindu
Chicken
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I thought I'd be the first to introduce herbal tea to Patna. White tea, ginger tea, rooibos, camomile. No one touched it. On subsequent visits, I'd find the packets decorating the shelves in my parents' dining room.
Amitava Kumar / Writer
Decorating
Dining
Ginger
Shelves
Touched
Be The First
Dining Room
Introduce
Subsequent
Visits
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We learn that our lives find narrative form neither in the tired, familiar slogans of our captains nor in the symmetries of ideological camps, but in the differences that thrive behind settled, more clear-cut divisions.
Amitava Kumar / Writer
Camps
Differences
Familiar
Ideological
Narrative
Slogans
Thrive
Divisions
Settled
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In 1997, Alain de Botton published his book 'How Proust Can Change Your Life.' I was charmed by it. I remember using it in a course on cultural criticism for a graduate class that had a mix of theorists and creative writers.
Amitava Kumar / Writer
Charmed
Criticism
Proust
Life Change Your
Graduate
Mix
Published
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What is said by the person holding a megaphone inciting a crowd, or what is said by someone who incites a rumour? And what is the difference between that person and me, sitting in my room imagining something, telling a story?
Amitava Kumar / Writer
Rumour
Holding
Imagining
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A long, negative review I wrote of Rushdie's novel 'Fury' earned me a rebuke from the writer: He told an administrator at the college where I teach, and who had invited Rushdie to come speak, that he wouldn't share the stage with me.
Amitava Kumar / Writer
Fury
Invited
Rebuke
Where Me Long
Administrator
Earned
Review
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I've immersed myself in reading more and more of American literature, but no editor has asked me to comment on Jonathan Franzen or Jennifer Egan. It is assumed I'm an expert on writers who need a little less suntan lotion at the beach.
Amitava Kumar / Writer
American Literature
Beach
Comment
Jennifer
Lotion
Assumed
Editor
Expert
Immersed
Jonathan
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I like to write about real people, real crimes. But what has increasingly come to interest me, and also appear to me as a challenge, is the idea of doing strange things with what is real. Take what is real and make it more or less real.
Amitava Kumar / Writer
Strange Things
Me People Doing
Appear
Me People Challenge
Crimes
Increasingly
More Or Less
Real People
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In fiction, you don't invent the events. What is imaginative about it is the consciousness: how you think about the events and how you present them. And that changes the nature of everything, and that is the attraction of writing fiction.
Amitava Kumar / Writer
Attraction
Consciousness
Imaginative
Invent
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Long ago, when I was in higher secondary school in Delhi, I read an essay by George Orwell in which he said there was a voice in his head that put into words everything he was seeing. I realised I did that, too, or maybe I started doing it in imitation.
Amitava Kumar / Writer
Imitation
Realised
Secondary School
Essay
Orwell
Secondary
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Michael Ondaatje’s work taught me how to be at home in fragments, and how to think about a big story in carefully curated vignettes. All his books were odd, all of them ‘unfinished’ the way Chopin’s Études are unfinished: no wasted gestures, no unnecessary notes.
Amitava Kumar / Writer
Home
Book
Thinking
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When we were getting married the Hindu way in Arrah, we had an old guest who asked my wife what her 'good name' was. I think she'd heard that I had married a Muslim. When my wife said, 'Mona Ahmed Ali,' the lady looked at me and exclaimed, 'Oh, so you've married a terrorist.'
Amitava Kumar / Writer
Getting Married
Heard
Married
Terrorist
Good Wife Me
Ali
Asked
Hindu
Oh
Guest
Lady
Looked
Mona
Muslim
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Does the entry of Indian H-1B worker augur a change in the relations of production in the world of cybertechnology? No, but the presence of such workers - their skills and their histories - introduce contradictions into the system that are not always easily absorbed or dissolved.
Amitava Kumar / Writer
Entry
Indian
Skills
Absorb
Change Always World
Worker
Contradictions
Easily
Dissolved
Histories
Introduce
Production
Presence
Relations
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In the U.S., the FBI or the people I met from the Department of Justice might be ignorant about Islam or about the East more generally, but I felt they were less willing to make blanket judgments about Muslims. This caution was less evident with some of the authorities I met in India.
Amitava Kumar / Writer
Blanket
Caution
Department
Evident
Fbi
Ignorant
Islam
Authorities
Department Of Justice
Judgments
Muslims
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India allows you the luxury of a million inequalities. You can be a schoolboy selling tea to passengers sitting in a state transport bus, but you are royalty when compared to a shirtless, barefoot village boy, from what was traditionally considered an untouchable caste, living on snails and small fish - and sometimes rats.
Amitava Kumar / Writer
Barefoot
Luxury
Passengers
Rats
Royalty
Selling
Sitting
Small Fish
Tea
Transport
Village
Living
Boy
Considered
Caste
Fish
Untouchable
Small
Inequalities
Million
Schoolboy
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In the way in which we are living in a much more explosive and more tension-filled society, a society that is driven with more and more contradictions, it is but unavoidable that some of this will also come into cinema. I would, in fact, argue that a part of it is borrowed from Hollywood. It's as if Quentin Tarantino has come to Mumbai.
Amitava Kumar / Writer
Borrowed
Driven
Mumbai
Tarantino
Contradictions
Explosive
Quentin Tarantino
Unavoidable
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Even fake news tries to convince us of its reality, but it does so mostly by appealing to your preconceived notions, your shared biases, or your prejudice. How to do the opposite? To create a sense of the real and then challenge your biases. I think that is my favourite aspect of writing, and that is what I've tried to do in 'The Lovers.'
Amitava Kumar / Writer
Aspect
Convince
Fake
Favourite
Lovers
News
Prejudice
Real
Reality
Writing
Opposite
Appealing
Does
Biases
Challenge
Create
Fake News
Mostly
Notions
Preconceived
Sense
Shared
Tried
Tries
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Amitava Kumar Quotes - Page 2

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